Marc Newson has been described as the most influential designer of his generation. He has worked across a wide range of disciplines, creating everything from furniture and household objects to bicycles and cars, private and commercial aircraft, yachts, various architectural commissions, and signature sculptural pieces for clients across the globe.

Marc Newson was included in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World and has received numerous awards and distinctions.

Marc Newson developed the Apple Watch with his old friend — and new boss — Jonathan Ive. Apple announced that Newson had joined its design team last September, when the watch and the iPhone 6 were unveiled at the firm’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. But he had already been working with Ive on watches. ‘It started long before the launch of the Apple Watch,’ he says with an Australian twang.

Three years ago he and Ive collaborated to create a customised Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox watch for an auction of their favourite objects to raise funds for RED, the charity set up by U2’s Bono to fight AIDS. It was Ive’s first watch but one of many for Newson. In the 1990s, he founded a company called Ikepod that made a few thousand watches. Ikepod and the Jaeger-LeCoultre collaboration ‘led Jony to the conclusion that it might be a good thing to get me involved on the Apple Watch,’ says Newson.